One way to understand our civil life is the system we call capitalism. For our purposes here, capitalism is an economic system in which wealth, and the means of producing wealth, are privately owned, operated and traded, without force or fraud, by private individuals, singly or jointly. (Google) Capitalism in our day is defined by the accumulation of money, and that definition often becomes greed. A friend of mine told me the other day that capitalism is having money without a soul.

The sorry part of all of that is that we are in a day and time when we need to see our land as a corporate body. For example, the voters whose votes were cast for the losing candidate do not accept that the persons who won are running the country, however, since the majority rules, there is a need to support the will of the election.

Change was the word that was used by all candidates. No one ever said we need to keep on the way we were going. As I see our national life, we got ourselves into a mess, both as persons and as a nation. Corrections need to be made. The changes are started, but this is not an easy road. From personal credit card accounts, to the smallest governing body, to our national body, we are in debt. There is clearly no quick fix.

The elected officials we have placed in charge are working on finding ways to put our economy back on track away from deficit spending and huge indebtedness. Now, you may think their efforts are wrong and you may also blame them for the mess. The truth to me is that we all are at fault. Individuals for a very long time have spent beyond their means, wars are in process requiring expenditures way beyond our means, and investors have robbed people of their life savings. All of which tells us that changes must be made. I believe from top to bottom we are reducing our expenditures and are finding ways to heal a broken economy. In order for the change to happen, money handling must include a corporate belief in the American Way of life.

It is plain to me is that all of us still believe in the principals found in a democracy. We may think others are wrong, and we do not tell them to be like us. We need a strong belief in diversity within our unity. In order for our common belief to become in force, the notion of "taxation without representation" that stood our founding fathers well in the opposition to tax dollars going overseas, must be part of our change. Tax dollars are being spent the wrong way. We have to fight for education support and for highway maintenance. Our representatives tell us that their raises are law and cannot be changed. There are many things that need to be changed. There are corporations who are protected by our laws but who move their operations overseas and keep the profit for themselves. There are all sorts of federal subsidies that benefit persons and groups that need changing. Our taxes are what we pay so that we can live in a land that meets our communal needs and protect us from injury. They do not pay for our lifestyles or allow us to make profits. We need to put our souls back into our national life so that our humanity can help our economy.